Sometimes downloading a white paper or study is a waste of time. I have downloaded hundreds of lead-generating ebooks and have found very few of them to be worth the time. Occasionally, a big study or survey piece will reveal some salient points, and I’m glad to have read it, but really it’s about 10% of the overall content. Here in a severaly abbreviated form is The State of Mobile Marketing 2017 from Incite Group and OpenMobile Media.

Here are the most important mobile challenges as outlined by the study.

Content and Context and Relevance are the top two challenges. How do you build a mobile app or platform that is relevant and valuable to your customers? Tons of businesses are creating apps that do nothing well. They are simply entries into the crowded mobile space. If you don’t understand the content part of the equation, it does not matter if you have an app or not.

Creating a personalized customer experience. That’s the top potential. How do you go about doing that? What mobile feature has not been covered? How does your app or program provide something new, something useful, something unique?

Make note that brand awareness and increased engagement are the top two objectives of mobile marketing. Sales is not the primary goal. When building a mobile program are you concentrating too much on sales? Do you have the budget to build something for brand awareness that does not drive sales?

The mobile marketing space is hard and apps are expensive to produce. And if they don’t increase revenue, what is the point?

Maybe you should concentrate on how well you site performs in the mobile browsing experience. Well over half your audience is viewing your site on their phone. And that includes B2B sites as well.

Get your mobile act together before you consider a mobile app. And make sure you understand the content that your audience would find valuable. Sales messaging is not going to fly and will get your app dropped, ignored, and deleted.

If you don’t look at the Audience > Mobile > Overview tab in Google Analytics you might be surprised to see the breakdown of devices coming to your website. If you have a crappy, or un-planned mobile web experience set up for the incoming smartphone visitors, you’re going to give them a less than optimal experience. And if you haven’t thought of them at all, you’re going to lose them before they see the first sentence of your site. Here’s the location for understanding the mobile mix of your website.

Then the analytical part is fairly simple. How many mobile visitors do you have? Is the number significant enough to demand a bit of work to configure a better mobile web experience?

If the answers to those two questions are both affirmative, then you’ve got several easy options.

1. Select a free theme from WordPress.org that has a mobile component, or a flexible design. (Make sure you test these on your phone, so you can see what your visitors see. Some themes are better than others.)

2. Buy a theme that has a more robust mobile version. (The Pagelines theme I use on uber.la has a very well implemented mobile interface.

3. Use the Jetpack Plugin and enable the mobile theme. This could be the simplest way to get everything you need without any work.

If you add Jetpack (you get a lot of stuff you may want to check out) and your site looks fine on your phone, then you are done. If Jetpack’s mobile option doesn’t float your boat, then you can explore the free “flexible” or “variable” themes. And then go look at some of your favorite sites. Then check out their phone interface. See if you can determine what theme they are using. (Yes, a good portion of the web today is built on WordPress and opening up the page in code view will show you quickly what the name of the theme is. The Google it.)

It’s interesting to note of the two sites I am showing stats for above, there is a fairly different mix of technologies. You’ll notice the tech blog (uber.la) has a larger percentage of desktop-using visitors. While the mobile and tablet access on the first site is much higher, due to the significantly higher female demographic for that content.

Know your audience. Get your mobile web in order. No matter how small your traffic is, if you are turning away your phone visitors, you could be killing valuable readers and potential buyers.